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Economic crisis, but not for war profiteers

ARMSFLOW is a data visualization which displays arms transactions globally between 1950 and 2006. It was created by Jeffrey Warren of Vestal Design with data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Jeffrey Warren, Vestal Design, and ARMSFLOW are not affiliated in any way with SIPRI.

ARMSFLOW includes 14,619 arms transactions (each is a sum of 1 year’s exports) and 228 government entities.

… [T]he SIPRI Top 100 maintained the upward trend in their arms sales, an increase of a total of 59 per cent in real terms since 2002.

Arms sales of the Top 10 arms-producing companies approached $228 billion, which is 56.9 per cent of the SIPRI Top 100 total arms sales in 2009.

‘US government spending on military goods and services is a key factor in arms sales increases for US arms-producing and military services companies and for Western European companies with a foothold in the US arms and military services market,’ states SIPRI arms industry expert Dr Susan Jackson.

Major regional differences

Of the SIPRI Top 100 arms-producing companies, 78 are based in the United States and Western Europe. These companies generated $368 billion in total arms sales, which is 91.7 per cent of the total arms sales of the SIPRI Top 100 arms producers in 2009.

The following describes the breakdown of the SIPRI Top 100 in the USA and Western Europe.

* 45 of the SIPRI Top 100 are based in the USA. These companies generated just under $247 billion in total arms sales, which is 61.5 per cent of the SIPRI Top 100 arms sales.
* 33 of the SIPRI Top 100 are based in nine Western European countries (Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK). These companies generated $120 billion in total arms sales, which is 30 per cent of the SIPRI Top 100 arms sales.
* 26 of the top Western European arms producers are based primarily in four countries: France, Germany, Italy, and the UK.
* Ten of the SIPRI Top 100 are based in Asia (3 in India, 4 in Japan, 1 in Singapore, 2 in South Korea), excluding China, and 5 in the Middle East (3 in Israel, 1 in Kuwait, 1 in Turkey). The SIPRI Top 100 companies in these two regions generated $24 billion in combined arms sales, which is 6 per cent of the SIPRI Top 100 arms sales in 2009.
* None of the companies in the SIPRI Top 100 in 2009 are based in Latin America or Africa.

Also from SIPRI, the Top 10 of their Top 100 of merchants of death; (between brackets) the corporations’ positions on the 2008 list:

Anti-arms trade campaigners today condemned the Tories after it was revealed that they received hundreds of thousands of pounds from the wife of a billionaire arms dealer: here.

“The gift that keeps on giving” should have been the headline on the Pentagon’s decision to award the Boeing Co. a $35 billion defense contract. Defense of the nation, of course, had nothing to do with it: here.

The NATO Air Command and Control System Management Agency (NACMA) on behalf of the NATO Active Layered Theatre Ballistic Missile Defence Programme Office and in coordination with the NATO Command, Control and Consultation Agency, has signed a contract with ThalesRaytheonSystems to deliver a Ballistic Missile Defence Interim Capability element at NATO’s Air Command in Ramstein, Germany.

The contract value is €3 million.

Implementation of the contract, which is expected within three months, will deliver a key component toward NATO’s objective of declaring an interim missile defence capability at its summit in Chicago in May.

It will give NATO the capability to conduct 24/7 territorial missile defence operations while simultaneously deploying a theatre missile defence command and control capability to any necessary theatre of operations.

Northrop Grumman received the contract as one of five major defense contractors on the Missile Defense National Team to continue development, operations and sustaining work on the program.

The C2BMC program is seen as a crucial component of the U.S. ballistic missile defense strategy and is being designed to interconnect and integrate all the various elements of the U.S. ballistic missile defense system, the company said.

C2BMC is being designed to assist integrated ballistic missile defense by linking sensors, maximizing the agency’s ability to detect and track threats. It also integrates ballistic missile defense capabilities by using global sensor and data networks and space-based intelligence assets.

Given the likelihood of possible simultaneous missile launches, a key C2BMC component is the system’s ability to engage multiple threats.